


Coffins Can't Hold The Past You've Broken

by raendown



Category: Naruto
Genre: ALL ABOARD THE ANGST TRAIN, Fanart, Gen, just pretend it's halloween yeah?, this was supposed to be posted on halloween
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-03-18 01:49:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13671759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raendown/pseuds/raendown
Summary: The first human trial for the Edo Tensei jutsu is also the last before it is declared forbidden.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Now including heart wrenching art by the wonderful @[redhothollyberries](http://redhothollyberries.tumblr.com/), bless her evil soul

He had considered doing this at Hashirama’s gravesite. Tobirama was under no illusions that what he was doing wasn’t a sin. Might as well do it proper and sin right over Anija’s grave, right? It would keep them all together at least.

**When was the last time we were all together?**

What stopped him was the chance of witnesses. Even now, a year after his death, Hashirama’s burial place was very rarely unattended. No matter that his fellow supplicants usually afforded him a measure of false privacy when he visited his brother, the fact remained that there was almost always someone just out of sight. There was too much of a chance that he would be seen. He could care less for his own reputation but Hashirama had entrusted him with leading the village and all the people in it. He could hardly do that if he were to terrify the citizens with his own depravities.

And they _were_ depravities. Tobirama was more than aware of what he was, what he could never hope to be. The people who were now consigned to following him deserved better than the empty shell of a person that he was. His brother’s legacy deserved more than being watched over by a faded beast of a man, carved hollow by regrets he could not fix.

**How could you trust me with something so precious, so fragile? Do you see me, brother? Do you see the way I slowly poison this beautiful thing you wrought with another?**

So instead Tobirama went home. Each step felt as though it echoed through him as he trod the paths through a village which he had never belonged in. So many had died chasing this dream, so many futures ended too soon. And for what? In the end his brother had been betrayed by the very man Tobirama had warned him against and spent his last days in dark silence. Just one more heartbreak that could have been prevented if only he had acted sooner.

If only he had been _better_. Not even his best efforts had set him above the madman who rejected his elder again and again and betrayed him after all was said and done. Even after everything that had happened he had never been first in his brother’s eyes. The knowledge of it would never stop burning.

Citizens watched him passing by and their gazes felt like snakes waiting to strike. He wondered what they thought of him, the replacement, the lesser of two. Surely they could see each one of his long list of failures hanging over him just as he did, waiting to crush him at a moment’s notice. He was never meant for this.

More than anything else in the world, Tobirama wanted to go home. Not to the house that his brother had built but to the grounds they had walked as they grew up together. He wanted to tread the same earth his brothers had tread, touch the same trees that they had played in. More and more as the years passed him by Tobirama yearned to go back to a time when he hadn’t known how deceiving ‘peace’ would be or how empty a thing it would become.

**You were born of mother, with peace kissed across your brow. And I am what you always accused me of being: the child of my father, a man built for nothing but death and war.**

Removing himself from the venomous eyes that watched him wasn’t nearly as big of a relief as it should have been. He could feel the weight of them even as he shut himself away inside his own house. It was an empty house, cold and dark, built of hallways where laughter no longer echoed. There had been a time when a single light had remained in his life to chase away the shadows. Hashirama had filled this home with his presence in life. In death he haunted it.

Tobirama’s eyes skittered past the frames on his walls holding images of those now lost to him. Some were photographs, fascinating inventions which captured moments of the past that he wished he could go back to. Some were drawings etched by his own hand, depictions of faces that hadn’t seen the light of day in decades, faces which never had the chance to change and grow.

Faces he would see again today.

Pale fingers traced the wooden frames as he drifted passed, unable to look but incapable of stopping himself from reaching out the same way he always had, reaching for absolution. His family had always been the only absolution in his life, the one good part of him. Without them, Tobirama could only watch himself in the mirror each morning, descending slowly in to the monster he’d always known he was capable of becoming.

**You tried to guide me and I wanted to be better. Was I so incapable of it? Was it my destiny to be the darkness to your light? What happens when the light goes out?**

Being alone had never been good for him. With no one left to give him boundaries, to stop him from going too far, Tobirama was unfettered from descending to new lows. It had only been a year since Hashirama died, only a year since Mito left this place as well, unable to live with naught but a ghost. A year was all the time he needed to master a jutsu which deep down he knew would have shamed his brother. It took effort to press back the voices in his mind, that conscience whose voice sounded so familiar. Hadn’t he already spent a lifetime shaming his brother in one way or another? A lifetime filled with never minding the boundaries, always pressing too far and asking too much. What was one more?

But how bad could a thing be, he rationalized, when he had only created it with the best of intentions? There was nothing wrong with the desire to change the past. It was only normal to seek out ways to repent for one’s mistakes.

He just so happened to have more mistakes than most.

**No more Anija; I will make no more mistakes. Watch me please. I want to do something good.**

Footsteps echoed on cold floorboards as Tobirama moved through the house like a ghost. Layers of dust covered the surface of rooms he hadn’t dared to enter in months, too afraid of the shades waiting for him within. They rose to greet him now as he let himself look around for perhaps the first time in too long. He stood in the doorway of an empty room, mired in memories and the absence thereof, unsure which hurt the most.

There was the spot where he had last seen his Anija’s smile, too long before his death, as he spoke about his granddaughter.

Here was the place where he had stood as he listened to his sibling plan his wedding day.

That was the couch he had sat upon as Hashirama gushed over the new village he had built with his best friend.

**Was I ever a happy memory for you?**

No matter how he looked, however, there was an absence which tore at him. Nowhere was there a place for two faces more precious to him than any other. Here there were no memories of the two which should have been by his side all these years.

Instead there were empty spaces, holes in the tapestry which should have been the life they built together, the memories they created as a team, a unit, a _family_.

While the dusty air settled in his lungs, choking his throat and pricking his eyes, Tobirama let his feet carry him to one corner of a dark room, beneath the painting of sycamore trees which reminded him of a faraway place where similar trees stood guard over too small graves. His fingers traced the edges of the objects in his pocket, hesitating only slightly before pulling them out and letting them roll together in his palm.

**I will give them a happy memory here, Anija.**

The prize he pulled from his pocket was no true prize, no glorified treasure to be displayed and bragged of. His fingers trembled as they held the glass vials, the samples no soul could ever know he had taken.

Edo Tensei, the grave robbers jutsu. The power to give life to the dead came at a heavy price, a sin so vile that only he could ever think to commit it. Disturbing the resting place of his long dead brothers had not been easy. But it had been _necessary_ and Tobirama always did what was necessary even when others couldn’t or wouldn’t. Now for his efforts he held in his hand the final component he needed to finally set some things to right.

Well, apart from the unconscious bodies half propped against the wall in the corner, scheduled to be executed for treason but repurposed for perhaps the one bit of good their poor forms had ever been a part of. They were going to die anyway, he reasoned. Was it so wrong that he give their death a better purpose?

For a man who had lived his own life mired in sin, it was only logical that Tobirama commit one more on the path to seeking forgiveness.

**Would you allow this compromise? I can’t remember anymore. Even you are fading from me. Come back. Come back.**

It took but a few moments to prepare everything, laying out the samples and drawing the seals that the jutsu required. Perhaps thinking that he had ‘mastered’ this was being a bit generous. In his experiments so far he had managed to bring back the small animals he had used during testing: chickens slaughtered for dinner and a small street dog which lost a fight and died curled up under his porch. Tonight would be the first attempt at retrieving a human soul.

There was no flash of light nor reverent sound when the jutsu began its work. This was not the sort of activity during which one would want attention to be drawn. His activities this night were more the sort which should be hidden behind closed doors, tucked away in nightmares to never be spoken of. Were Hashirama here he would never have stooped so low as to conceive of this idea.

But therein lay his problem. Hashirama was not here. There was no one here. His loved ones had preceded him to the grave one by one, instances of his failures again and again. It should be him buried and gone, his worthless life that should have been given in place of others more deserving. Yet it was him that closed his ears against the screams as his living sacrifices woke to the pain of their final moments, that watched the ashes rise to cover the bodies and coalesce in to something far greater.

**I’ve done it. Are you watching? I’ve brought good in to this world.**

Silence reigned for long dark moments. Somehow the usual triumph of a successful jutsu was missing from this terrible, wonderful moment. He should have felt awe filling him – joy and relief. So why were his limbs trembling?

“Where are we?”

That voice was like a lance through his heart, a memory he’d thought he was ready to hear again. He wasn’t. Oh how he wasn’t.

Cracks decorated their faces, dark lines painting their skin in to the image of broken marionettes. The sclera of their eyes was a cursed black as though he had left his own taint upon them. Neither of those things could hide the beauty of youth nor the perfect reflection of how he remembered them. They were just as they had been. And it hurt.

**This moment should be happy. Am I happy? I don’t feel happy.**

“I don’t like it here!” Kawarama whimpered as he tucked himself closer in to his brother’s side. Itama wrapped him in both arms, bi-tonal hair falling in his face as they both stared up at the man standing over them.

“Itama…” Tobirama fell to his knees, feeling his face twist as his heart did inside his chest. “Kawarama…”

“Get back!”

He recoiled as if slapped, taking in now what he had refused to see before: the fear. The two before him looked terrified with their stained eyes wide and full of tears, their bodies hunched away from him and coiled together in a bid to keep each other safe. They looked like children cowering from a monster.

**I _am_ a monster. **

“Who are you?” The older demanded.

“Please, Itama, it’s me.” Almost without his permission his hand reached out in helpless entreaty. His fingers closed on empty air, claws trying to dig deeper in to the hell he had built for himself.

“We don’t know you!” Itama shouted at him.

“I’m scared!” Tears made horrible tracks down Kawarama’s face, catching in the scars upon his cheek. “I don’t like it here, send us back!”

“Let go of us, we don’t belong here!”

If there had been any part of Tobirama’s heart unbroken, it was no longer so. The world itself seemed to shatter around him, all strength leaving his body as he felt his own tears gathering in his eyes. Why didn’t they know him?

**Help me. Please help. Why don’t they know me? Help, Anija.**

“No, please, I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“Let us go!”

“Send us back!”

“We don’t want this!”

“Someone help us!”

“Stop, please!” Tobirama clutched his head between both hands, unable to tear his eyes from the nightmare before him. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!”

Kawarama screamed, the wordless howl of a child in terror, and Tobirama began to cry.

**This isn’t real. It isn’t real! I didn’t do this!**

“It’s me! It’s Tobirama! Please remember me,” he begged. Without thought he shuffled forward on his knees, wanting only to be closer. He froze when his siblings recoiled from him. “I’m your brother!”

“This hurts,” Kawarama whimpered.

“We don’t belong here,” Itama said, voice wavering with tears. “Please let us _go_.”

**This isn’t what I wanted! I just wanted to do something right!**

With a wounded cry Tobirama released his head and slammed his hands together, almost forgetting the seals in his haste. His ears were filled with screaming, his vision flooded with the picture of their terror, and yet still he could not help himself. His body moved on its own, jerking forward and reaching out to touch those perfect faces just one more time.

A moment later they were gone, disintegrated in to two formless lumps of ash, and Tobirama was left alone with his arm outstretched towards empty space without ever having reached his brothers. The limb dropped heavily, catching him as he fell forward. His entire body collapsed down in to itself until he knelt prostrate on the hard floor as though begging forgiveness that he had never deserved from those who could not give it.

Tobirama wanted to scream but didn’t. His teeth clenched, his hands fisted, and his eyes shut tight to block out the image of what he had done. In seeking absolution, trying one more time just to do something right for a change, he had committed his worst sin yet. He was doomed, it seemed, to defile everything he touched.

Endless tears rained down in silence to pool in the dust beneath him. He knelt in the dark for hours, unmoving, wishing desperately for someone to find him and grant him an end to this unbearable pain. But no one ever came.

There was no one left to come.

**Do you see me brother? Do you see what I have done? Don’t look. Oh please don’t look at me.**

 

-

 

_ Results of Edo Tensei Experimental Trial 87, Dated October 31 _

_Subjects who experienced trauma before death not suitable for resurrection._

_Memories of suffering retained; emotional stability not optimal._

_No further testing will be done._

_Jutsu to be declared forbidden._


	2. Chapter 2




End file.
